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stag

nounverbadverbattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//staɡ//
  • United States//stæɡ//
  • Australia//stæːɡ//
  • New Zealand//stɛɡ//
  • //steɪɡ//

An adult male deer, especially a red deer and especially one in high adulthood versus a young adult.

noun

  1. 1

    An adult male deer, especially a red deer and especially one in high adulthood versus a young adult.

    The city recently carried out a deer census, determining there are 313 stags (males), 798 does (females) and 214 fawns (babies) in Nara Park.

  2. 2

    A young horse (colt or filly).

  3. 3

    A male turkey: a turkeycock.

  4. 4

    obsoleteA romping girl; a tomboy.

  5. 5

    An improperly or late castrated bull or ram – also called a bull seg (see note under ox).

  6. 6

    An outside irregular dealer in stocks, who is not a member of the exchange.

  7. 7

    One who applies for the allotment of shares in new projects, with a view to sell immediately at a premium, and not to hold the stock.

  8. 8

    An unmarried man; a bachelor; a man not accompanying a woman at a social event.

    a stag dance; a stag party; a stag bar

  9. 9

    A social event for men held in honor of a groom on the eve of his wedding, attended by male friends of the groom; sometimes a fundraiser.

    The stag will be held in the hotel's ballroom.

  10. 10

    A man who allows his wife to have sex with other men.

    The stag gets a thrill from watching his vixen have sex with another man.

  11. 11

    slangAn informer.

    We had two disturbers of the harmony of the ship; I mean two stags or informers, one named Robert Wilson, the other John Hewit, from the north of Ireland.

  12. 12

    slangGuard duty.

    Between shifts on stag or manning the radio, we grabbed a few hours sleep.

    Three days were spent on standby or patrols and a fourth day on guard, with at least eight hours on stag.

  13. 13

    A stag beetle (family Lucanidae).

    Members of the genus Pasimachus […] can be confused with stag beetles […] but stags have elbowed antennae.

  14. 14

    The Eurasian wren, Troglodytes troglodytes.

Etymology

From Middle English stagge, steg, from Old English stagga, stacga (“a stag”) and possibly Old Norse steggi, steggr (“a male animal”), both from Proto-Germanic *staggijô, *staggijaz (“male, male deer, porcupine”), probably from Proto-Indo-European *stegʰ-, *stengʰ- (“to sting; rod, blade; sharp, stiff”). Doublet of steg (“gander”). Cognate with Icelandic steggi, steggur (“tomcat, male fox”). Related to staggard, staggon.

verb

  1. 1

    To act as a "stag", an irregular dealer in stocks.

  2. 2

    To watch; to dog, or keep track of.

adverb

  1. 1

    Of a man, attending a formal social function without a date.

    My brother went stag to prom because he couldn't find a date.

Forms

plural
stags
past tense
stagged
past participle
stagged
present participle
stagging
third person singular
stags
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).